I’m sure you can suggest some great hacks too, so I’d like to know — what are your favorite ROM hacks?

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While I’m glad that ROM hacks have been allowed to exist so far despite the legal issues, there always remains the threat that video game companies will eventually become more aggressive in pursuit of “protecting” their intellectual property, SOPA or not. I think a better idea would be for companies to hire particularly creative ROM hackers and retro-inspired programmers and assemble small retro game divisions within their companies.

Seriously, how cool would it be if Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, etc. all had dedicated retro teams producing new 8- and 16-bit style games for digital distribution on a regular basis? We know there is a market for it, and look how well received Mega Man 9 and 10 were, for example. The ease of making those types of games nowadays means fast development cycles and low overhead, which translates to affordable games for a hungry market. All the better if those games are made by passionate, skilled, creative, and dedicated fans, who have proven that they care enough to do that kind of work for free, let alone for a paycheck. Fans are going to make these kinds of games anyway, so Nintendo and others would be wise to try to profit from that work. Everybody wins in that scenario.

I’m going to make the effort to play a few of these, thanks to the article. My experience with ROM hacks is either the impossibly hard or just incredibly random–like all those SMB hacks: the punk one, the one with juvenile humor, the MST3K one, Super Peach Sisters, etc.

I did like a few hacks of that old Sopwith game, like Sokwith and Blockwith.

JackSoar: That actually happens sometimes. People making add-ons, hacks, plugins and other new stuff to old games have ended up hired into the game industry as long as the industry has been around. But I wouldn’t complain if it happened more frequently.

There’s also “An SMW Central Project”, “Super Pika Land Ultra”, and the English translation of “Brutal Mario”, all of which I’ve personally played and fully enjoyed.

For Genesis, I’d recommend “Sonic the Hedgehog Megamix” (a Sonic 1 hack that changed so much that it had to be moved to Sega CD) and “Sonic 2 Heroes” (which puts the player-switching mechanic of Sonic Heroes into Sonic 2).